This issue includes a range of papers with topical themes, particularly that of gamification and virtual reality in online and blended learning. It is exciting to see that authors are not focussing only on university or college level education but increasingly on designing learning interventions and approaches for lower age groups, including pre-schoolers. Also of great interest is a paper where the target audience is the working population, using digital interactive approaches in industrial training and maintenance services.
We have relatively few submissions where digital interactive learning is brought into the working adult environment, and would like to see many more as the transformation of the working environment is much on our minds following the ongoing impacts of Covid-19 on workplaces. “Working from home” is clearly not possible for all, but where work roles allow, digital learning will play an increasing role, and even for jobs which require presence in the work site, personal service roles for example, digital tools are increasingly deployed and we need further enquiry to establish good and best practice as these tools are adopted. The workplace has always been a prime learning space, whether formally or informally.
Meanwhile, in this journal we are increasingly receiving offers and proposals to put together Special Issues, something which we have done in the past with pleasure since they offer a focus and development of academic interest in a specific domain. However, for some time we have had to politely turn down such proposals. The reason is simply the popularity of the journal. We have a high submission rate and although the blind peer review process can take some time, and of course many papers do not make it through to acceptance due to this rigorous process, nonetheless we have many accepted papers which are published online but not yet in a published volume and issue. Your editors are doing their very best to reduce the time lag between acceptance and thus online publication, and publication in a journal issue, and one of the consequences is that we cannot accept Special Issue proposals for a while.
However we did, in Issue 5 this year, publish an invitation for Collections. The main purpose of a Collection is to provide a permanent record of published articles in the journal, themed together and easily accessible from the collections page and from each article in the collection. This encourages research across the published papers in the journal from a particular themed viewpoint and allows successful guest editors to add a small number of papers to pull together this published collection. This gathering together of existing published work with current perspectives is an exciting proposition, although please bear in mind that acceptance of the application for such a Collection will not be granted lightly: the theme must be tightly defined and highly relevant to the journal’s scope. If you would like to research the journal’s publications and consider grouping and discussing them in this way, please apply to Joe Psotka or myself and we will send you an application form. We are delighted to announce in this issue the first agreed Collection in progress, details below.
Sue Greener
Co-Editor
Collection call: Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the design and application of Open Educational Practices
Open Educational Practices (OEP) have emerged as innovative practices that could help in enhancing the learning experience and outcomes through the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). Specifically, four main dimensions could be covered under OEP, namely: (1) OER which are educational resources that are shared under an open license and can be used within a given OEP-based course; (2) Open teaching/pedagogy implies that teachers should implement teaching methodologies that can allow learners to actively contribute to the co-creation of knowledge and be self-regulated; (3) Open collaboration implies that teachers should build open communities to foster teamwork (e.g. editing a blog, creating a Wikipedia page) and social interaction; (4) Open assessment implies that teachers design learning tasks that foster not only teacher assessment, but also peer assessment. This can emphasize reflective practices and improve learning outcomes. All these dimensions are enabled by several technologies, such as social networks and collaborative editing tools.
Despite that several studies have reported that OEP will be part of future education even in uncertain times, several questions remained unanswered related, for instance, to students monitoring and assessment in open learning environments, as well as cross-cultural tensions among students. Artificial Intelligence (AI), on the other hand, has emerged as a crucial technology to enhance the learning experience online by, for instance, analysing students’ data automatically or personalize the learning process. However, despite that massive research has been conducted on how AI should be designed and integrated in traditional e-learning systems, little is known about how AI could be embedded within open learning environments or used to enhance open learning experiences, including providing automatic open assessment and modelling, as well as personalized OEP.
Therefore, given the background above, this special collection presents several published studies in the Interactive Learning Environments journal related to the topic “Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the design and application of Open Educational Practices.” It also calls for new practical studies related to the innovative use of AI in open learning environments to enhance the design of OEP, as well as their learning outcomes.
Please note that all articles submitted to this collection will go through a regular blind review process, and appear online upon acceptance. Please submit in the normal way to the journal, noting the Article Type as Collection. If you have any questions, please feel free to email the guest editors of this collection via [email protected]